Understanding retail gasoline pricing:An empirical approach

Retail gasoline markets offer an abundance of price data at the daily and, more recently, hourly level. Firms in this industry use sophisticated price strategies. Moreover, there have been a number of important recent market developments. All this makes retail gasoline a promising industry to study in order to enhance our understanding of the functioning of markets. We focus on several previously unexplored questions: What are the effects of the increasing importance of unmanned retailing on competition? What is the role of retail price recommendations and discounts in markets with significant inter-temporal price uncertainty? And finally, does lower price uncertainty always mean less search irrespective of consumer risk preferences? This thesis provides a number of insights into these issues

The impact of process innovation on prices:Evidence from automated fuel retailing in The Netherlands

In the last decade, many European countries have seen a sharp increase in the number of automated fueling stations. We study the effect of this process innovation on prices at stations that are automated and their competitors using a difference-in-differences matching strategy. Our estimates show that prices at automated stations drop by 1.7 to 3.2% immediately after conversion and stabilize at this lower level. Unlike previous studies, our estimates do not reveal a difference in impact between early and later adopters of automation. Indicative of competitive spillovers, prices at stations within 2 km of an automated station decrease on average with a precisely estimated 0.2%. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved